In their own words – A review of We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria by Wendy Pearlman

A lot of writing about events (either contemporary  or long past) can feel strangely sterile or detached from the lives of everyday people. This is understandable since the voices that recount events to us in books tend to come

from historians or journalists – historians tend to strive for academic objectivity and write in a way to appeal to people who regard the approval of peer-reviewed journals as existential while journalists tend to write from the perspective of decision makers since they spend most of their live covering and / or exposing the powerful. The end result of this is that our understanding of most events often tends to miss the voice of the everyday people most impacted by the great events of history. It is this uncommon story-telling through regular people’s lenses that endears this great book by a Northwestern University professor to me.

This book tells the story of the ongoing Syrian civil war, perhaps the worst human tragedy since World War II, as a series of over 80 reflections from everyday Syrians – ranging from rural shopkeepers to elite urban professionals, some very hostile to the regime and some somewhat sympathetic. Some of these reflections run into many pages and some are as short as a couple of sentences. However, these diverse reflections do not turn into a jumble as they are systemically organized into a series of nine chapters that provide a full view of the conflict: ranging from reflections charting the rise of the Baath party in the 60s and the emergence of Hafez al-Assad (father of the current president) as the leader of Syria in the early 70s, to the early years (& lost promise) of Bashir al-Assad’s rule in the early 2000s to the spark of the current conflict as part of the Arab Spring of 2011. The book also captures, in these people’s own words, how what started as a popular uprising turned into a very deadly proxy bottle and the harrowing experience many had on the perilous journeys to Europe to escape the war and the many deprivations that marks life in the various refugee camps that have sprouted all around the Levant and Turkey. There is also a somewhat hopeful aspect to some of these reflections as we see refugees now building a life for themselves in their new adopted countries: a young man now works in IT in Denmark after enduring a perilous journey through the Mediterranean while a young lady works as a nuclear engineer in Germany after escaping the war.  

On the whole I got a better feel for the genesis of this conflict, its sheer severity and the effects that this dreadful conflict has had on the average Syrian than I got from reading other books and articles that did not have this first-person narrative aspect.